Blabberize

Donna Desroches posted a link to Blabberize on Delicious the other day and the eight year old inside me fell in love with it right away. The problem is how to use it in the class.

I am spending some time during the break planning how to spruce up my Charlotte's Web unit for my Grade 3 class. Much of the stuff I have been able to think of is pretty mediocre.

Then I remembered Donna's link to Blabberize. It may seem pretty immature but I think it would be a great way to post a character sketch online at any age level.

Thanks to Donna for the link, coders who share my juvenile sense of humor, and social bookmarking!

PS - The embed doesn't seem to show up in Google Reader. :(

Oh...Now I Get It

At our last in school tech support meeting I finally got to put my hands on an XO...but I didn't get it. It felt cumbersome and the apps seemed weak. The eee pc seemed like it had more usable software and was more...conventional. Just this evening I ended up at he XO website and was going through the demos and descriptions and it hit me like lightning. Its not meant to be conventional. Duh! (I'm amazingly slow sometimes.)

It isn't meant to operate in isolation, its all about collaboration, its about simplicity, and its about removing barriers. All the things our current technology is lacking.

Now I get it.

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Learning to Read with SMARTBoards

I have two daughters: Emma is five and Julia is six.  Julia took to reading like a fish to water. Instantly, she seemed to catch on to the idea that each letter represented sounds and you could use them to built words and those words to build sentences.

Emma is a different story.  When we would look at Dolch words or word families you can see her glaze over.  Quickly, she'll ask, "Can I play now?" She gets her attention span from her moth...Ohhh! Look something shiny!

Where was I?  Oh ya, reading.  I decided to give the SMARTBoard a try.  I wrote some words on the board and we read them together (I, a, the, see, cat, dog).  Next we moved them around to built sentences (I see the dog,  I see a dog, etc).  She was able to tell me some words that rhyme with cat (rat, mat, sat hat, fat).  Then she was able to use the words to make a sentence (I see the fat rat).  Of course she thought that was immensely funny.

She wanted to make a longer sentence and ended up with "I see a fat rat on a flat mat."  The part she liked best was when I suggested she make a picture for her sentence using Tux Paint. Yay, Tux Paint!

This experience reminded me of two important things:

1) My daughter is a kinesthetic learner.

2) It is much easier to learn when its purpose is clear.

I think this is the first time Emma has thought of herself as a reader and I could not be prouder of her.

Digital Photogrphy In Art

We were learning about lines in our art class and I had a chance to use a class set of cameras. We decided to go out into the neighborhood and find examples of differnt types of lines. We took about 400 pictures and posted them to Picasa Web Albums and then the students chose three to download, edit, and post on their blog. Not all students are done and many who think they are have some editing to do but I think it worked well. Here is a link to our class blog.

The students seemed to really enjoy the process and they were able to frame their photos much better than I would have expected.

Evaluation of Input vs. Output

First of all, I can count the total hours of sleep I have had over the last three nights on one hand.  Pardon me if I ramble.

I have been struggling with report cards for term 2 because I feel like I have a lack of "concrete" marks in a couple of subject areas.  I could not think why my marks seemed so thin.  Then it occurred to me that I was planning my evaluation wrong.

It seems to me that assigning a numeric value to the analyzing, mapping, and evaluating that students to during the beginning phases of a project is harder to assess than the final product.  We know good output; what does a summative evaluation of input look like?  I think graphic organizers are part of the answer.